East Meets West in the Japanese Game of Besuboru

by Robert Whiting (Sep 15, 1986)

Digitized by Jessica Suchman and Catherine Nissley.

It looks much the same on the surface, but in the land of samurai and sumo baseball takes on a whole new dimension.

No
leisure activity occupies the Japanese as much as besuboru –
that's baseball in American. Last year, 16 million fans flocked to
see the 12 teams of Japan's Central and Pacific professional leagues,
while millions more tuned in to the nightly prime-time nationwide
telecasts and read the results in the country's seven sports dailies.
A recent survey found that one of every two of the nation's 120
million citizens is a besuboru fan, including the Prime
Minister and the Emperor.

The
leading attraction is the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, the oldest and
winningest team in the land, who draw standing-room only crowds
throughout the 130-game season lasting from April to October. When
the Giants play their traditional rivals from Osaka, the Hanshin
Tigers, the ticket lines form 24 hours in advance. At Koshien
Stadium, the Tigers' 60,000-seat home park, a barbed-wire fence keeps
the spectators off the field. Riot police patrol the bleachers.

Last
season, when the Tigers won their first pennant in 21 years, a wave
of Tiger-mania swept the land; it prompted a flood of souvenirs like
Tiger beer, Tiger soap and Tiger underwear, which, combined with
admission fees, service revenue and other related costs, generated
nearly half a billion dollars worth of income in the Osaka area
alone. At year's end a poll of Japanese newspaper readers picked the
outbreak of Tiger fever as one of the top ten domestic news stories
of 1985.

No
mere copy of its American cousin, the Japanese game is imbued with a
distinct flavor all its own. Spring training, for example, begins in
mid-winter. During the season, even pregame "warm-ups" are
grueling displays of fighting spirit. Home-run hitters willingly
bunt. Ace pitchers relieve. And there are so many on-field strategy
sessions that contests last more than three hours – longer, on the
average, than in the United States.

Standard
features at every game are the highly organized cheering groups, who
yell and chant nonstop to a deafening beat of trumpets, whistles and
drums for nine solid innings. In the press box, commentators use
sophisticated computer studies to evaluate each player's ability,
then blithely cite his blood type in the popular belief that it
somehow affects his performance.

It
all adds up to something that aficionados of the American game find
difficult to comprehend. As Reggie Smith, the former Los Angeles
Dodger star who played in Japan put it, "It looks like baseball,
but it's something else entirely."

Baseball's
roots in Japan can be traced back to 1873, when a visiting American
professor named Horace Wilson taught his students at Kaisei School
(now the University of Tokyo) how to play the game. From the start,
baseball was well liked. The Japanese found the one-on-one battle
between pitcher and batter similar in psychology to sumo wrestling
and the martial arts. As such, the sport was deemed good for the
development of the spirit and, hence, the national character. Soon
there were several high school and college teams in the Tokyo area.

It
wasn't until 1896, however, that the popularity of the game began to
soar. That year, the First Higher School in Tokyo beat a team of
Americans living in Yokohama, 29-4, in a game that made headlines
across the land. As one Japanese historian has written, "Foreigners
could not hope to understand the emotional impact of this victory,
but it helped Japan, struggling toward modernization after centuries
of isolation, overcome a tremendous inferiority complex it felt
toward the West."

Pitcher
Kotaru Moriyama, who later pitched a shut-out against the same
American team, became a hero of such proportions that he inspired a
popular saying: "To be hit by Moriyama's fastball is an honor
exceeded only by being crushed under the wheels of the Imperial
carriage."

By
the turn of the century, intercollegiate baseball was the country's
major sport and leading universities like Keio, Waseda and Meiji were
playing overseas competition. Warring student cheer groups had become
such a problem – their ranks often swelled by members of their
school judo clubs – that play was suspended on more than one
occasion.

Not
everyone was overjoyed with the popularity of this alien sport. In
1911, the influential conservative daily, Asahi Shimbun, ran
an editorial series entitled "The Evil of Baseball," quoting
several leading educators who opposed the game. Critic Inazo Nitobe,
for example, called baseball "a pickpocket's sport, in which
players try to swindle their opponents...to steal a base..." A
University of Tokyo physician claimed it was bad for the development
of the brain because of "mental pressure" placed on ballplayers
to win for the honor of their school – adding that throwing a
baseball all the time caused lopsided body development.

Baseball
survived the assault, thanks in part to support by a rival paper that
argued forcefully the game's value as a tool of education to develop
a spirit. In fact, the Asahi Shimbun later went on to sponsor
the annual National High School Baseball Summer Tournament, which
today is the biggest amateur sporting event in the land. College
baseball also thrived, and in 1935 the nation's first professional
baseball team was formed, following a highly successful tour of Japan
the previous year by a U.S. major-league all-star team that featured
Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The Americans were undefeated, but an
18-year-old high school student named Eiji Sawamura thrilled the
nation by striking out Charlie Gehringer, Ruth, Jimmy Foxx, and
Gehrig in succession, in a memorable 1-0 game.

Matsutaro
Shoriki, owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun, which sponsored the
tour, was so encouraged by this display of talent that he established
the Yomiuri Giants, quickly signing up Sawamura and other top
Japanese stars. Hanshin Railway and six other firms followed suit,
and in 1936 the Japanese Professional League began play. Its charter
stressed fair play and improvement of the national spirit. Yet many
feared that playing ball for money would dilute the purity of the
sport. Sawamura himself wanted passionately to remain an amateur and
play for Waseda University. It was only after his debt-ridden father
had committed him to a Yomiuri Giants contract without his knowledge,
securing a hefty loan in the process, that he agreed to turn pro.

Pro
baseball struggled in its early years. One stadium, built on the
least expensive real estate that could be found, was so close to
Tokyo Bay that incoming tides often flooded the field. During the
war, American baseball terminology was banned (besuboru became
yakyu or "field ball"), as was the hidden-ball trick, a
symbol of American chicanery. Players were referred to as "soldiers"
or "warriors" and games were often preceded by
hand-grenade-throwing contests. In 1945, play was suspended
altogether; when the war was over, 72 players had lost their lives,
including Sawamura, whose ship was torpedoed in the East China Sea.

Baseball
resumed in peacetime Japan and with an unusual salute to the
country's new institution of demokurashi, one team in 1946
actually chose its manager by player vote. In 1949, a visit by the
minor-league San Francisco Seals, who won all their games against
Japanese teams, helped re-stimulate interest. By 1950, the present
two-league setup was established, with pennant winners meeting in the
Japan Series. Most clubs were financed by large corporations for
promotional purposes. The Taiyo Whales, for example, existed solely
to promote the sales of whale meat and other products of the Taiyo
Fishery Company.

Pro
baseball's postwar growth paralleled that of Japan's skyrocketing
gross national product. By 1985, the Most Valuable Player award had
grown from a barrel of shoyu (soy sauce) awarded in 1950 to an
expensive new car and several thousand dollars' worth of prizes. The
Yomiuri Giants had won 16 Japan Series, including nine in a row from
1965 to 1973, becoming, in the process, a national institution. And a
Giants first baseman named Sadaharu Oh had hit 868 home runs in a
22-year career (1958-80), more than anyone else, including Babe Ruth
and Han Aaron.

Baseball's
grip on the national psyche is due, ultimately, to the fact that it
suits the national character. Introduced to a people whose very
identities were rooted in the group, but who, oddly enough, had no
group sport of their own – only one-on-one competitions like judo
and sumo – baseball provided the Japanese with an opportunity to
express their group proclivities on an athletic field. Over the years
it has been the team aspects of the game – the sacrifice bunt, the
squeeze, the hit-and-run, that have come to characterize Japanese
baseball, despite Oh's home runs.

Unlike
other groups sports, baseball also comes with a built-in individual
confrontation – a test of wills – which, as we have seen, gave it
its initial appeal to fans of the martial arts and sumo. The
"get-set" ritual in sumo, for example, with its squatting,
stamping and fierce glaring has its equivalent in the war of nerves
the pitcher and the batter wage, which involves delaying tactics like
calling time and cleaning spikes.

Perhaps
another reason for baseball's attraction for the Japanese is its
relatively slow pace. As any Western businessman familiar with Japan
will agree, the Japanese are a cautious people. They like to fully
discuss and analyze a problem before reaching a decision. On a
baseball field, the natural break between pitches and innings allows
ample time for this, which is one reason why Japanese pro games –
like Japanese business meetings – seem interminable.

Japanese
baseball has, on occasion, even invited comparisons with Kabuki, a
traditional Japanese form of theater in which performances last four
to five hours. The leisurely pitch-by-pitch format of the game, many
Japanese say, is not without its similarities to a Kabuki dialogue,
which depends on the dramatic use of ma (pauses). An admirer
of a top relief pitcher who recently retired explained his success by
saying, "He was good because he knew how to use the ma. He
waited for just the right moment – a momentary lapse of
concentration by the batter – to deliver his pitch."

Finally,
baseball seems ideally suited to the well-known statistical bent of
the Japanese. An abundance of data are available in Japan's sports
dailies – ten-column box scores, batter-by-batter accounts of every
game, and complex player-ranking formulas.

Having
celebrated its 50th anniversary, pro baseball in Japan has
become a mirror of the fabled Japanese virtues of hard work and group
effort. Said American Steve Ontiveros, a former Chicago Cub who
played in Japan for almost six years, "I've never seen anything
like a Japanese training camp. In the American majors, we were on the
field from 10 till 2 every day and we were ready to start the season
in three weeks. In Japan, we're all out there from January, seven to
eight hours a day, with lectures and indoor workouts in the evening.
It's incredible."

The
Japanese believe that good players are made, not born, and that only
through endless training, strictly supervised by coaches, can one
achieve the unity of mind and body necessary to excel. Home-run star
Koji Yamamoto of the Hiroshima Carp signs his autographs with the
word doryoku (effort). So does Sadaharu Oh, who now manages
the Giants.

The
emphasis on wa, or team harmony, is another distinguishing
characteristic of Japanese baseball. The Japanese have a saying, "The
nail that sticks up will be hammered down," and in baseball they
take it quite seriously. When the Giants' top pitcher Takashi
Nishimoto ignored the advice of a coach in practice last summer, the
coach punched him between the eyes. Nishimoto was also forced to
apologize and pay a $500 fine.

Excessive
concern over money is considered particularly harmful. In 1984, when
the Chunichi Dragons' top batter, Yasushi Tao, hit .352 and asked for
a big raise, he was traded. Praiseworthy are the players like a Seibu
Lions outfielder who, in the same year, refused a raise offered by
his club because he had missed too many games as the result of an
injury.

Not
all the players are overjoyed with this state of affairs (especially
since the minimum salary is only $18,000), but in Japan social
pressure is strong and the media are vigilant. When Nishimoto's
teammate Suguru Egawa asked for a ten percent raise one year after
slipping from 16 wins to 15, the Nikkan Sports, a leading
daily, ran the headline, "Egawa! You Greedy SOB!"

A
players' union was formally established in 1985, but an
American-style strike would be hard to imagine. As a players'
representative put it, "We'd never act like the U.S. major
leaguers. A strike would be going too far." In a recent Asahi
Shimbun survey, only 28 percent of the players polled said they
would ever agree to a walkout.

Tetsuharu
Kawakami (p.110), who before his retirement managed the Giants to
nine straight Japanese titles, occasionally lectures business groups
around the country on his managerial principles. Some of them are:
"Most players are lazy. It's the manager's responsibility to make
them train hard"; "Courteous players make for a strong team. It's
a manager's responsibility to teach them proper manners"; "Leaders
who are thought of as 'nice people' will fail"; "Lone wolves are
the cancer of the team."

Kawakami's
system has come to be known as kanri yakyu (controlled
baseball), because he controlled all phases of his players' lives. He
even forbade them to read comic books in public for fear it would
spoil the team image. Today, the foremost practitioner of kanri
yakyu is Tatsuro Hirooka, a lean and hard disciplinarian who
managed the Seibu Lions to three pennants in the past four years
before temporarily retiring due to illness. He has given the term new
meaning.

Hirooka
puts his teams on a strict natural-foods diet – fish, soybeans,
brown rice, tofu salad. He calls his players each night to make sure
they're in bed by his midnight curfew. More than once, he has
confined his squad to quarters while on the road as punishment for
bad play, and one season he went four straight months without
allowing his charges a single day off.

Two
years ago, Hirooka ran an "autumn camo" for his entire squad,
veterans and rookies alike, that surely qualified for the Guinness
Book of World Records. Lasting 59 days, from season's end to late
December (a time when most American ballplayers are relaxing in front
of television), it consisted of nine hours of daily drills, including
600 swings a day for each batter, 430 pitches a day for each pitcher,
as well as swimming and aikido (martial arts) sessions. Last
winter, he sent the Lions' star shortstop to any icy mountain river,
hoping an act of self-immersion would strengthen the player's spirit
and help make him a better leader.

Foreign
ballplayers, mostly refugees from the American major leagues, have
been part of Japanese baseball for years (there is currently a limit
of two per team). Yet, their presence has been met with mixed
emotions by their hosts. The gaijin (foreigner, outsider), as
he is called, demands several times the pay of his Japanese
counterpart. (Gaijin receive about $75,000 minimum to play in
the starting lineup.) Still, he is often unable to adjust to the
unusual style of play, which includes a different strike zone,
breaking-ball pitching and a Spartan philosophy. Roughly half of all
new gaijin recruits each year are not invited back. "I was
in a daze for six months," says one American of his initial season.
In 1983, a former major-league all-star, Bump Wills, signed a
four-year contract with the Hankyu Braves for a total of $1.6
million. By the middle of his second season, Wills was sitting on the
farm-team bench with a batting average in the low .200s, awaiting his
release.

The
individualistic attitude of the American player is a particular sore
point, for it invariably clashes with that of his group-oriented
hosts. Reggie Smith received a million dollars from Yomiuri in 1983,
the highest figure ever paid to a foreign player and nearly twice
that of any Japanese player. He hit 28 home runs and led his team to
a pennant. Even so, Smith insisted on his own pregame practice
routine, which was considerably lighter than that of his teammates
and a major source of consternation to coaches and sports writers
alike. Noting that Smith never participated in the repetitive and
exhausting fly-ball sessions that other Giants outfielders went
through daily, one television commentator said, "Smith should take
more fielding practice in the interest of team harmony."

Smith's
response was typical of a player who had spent years in the American
major leagues. "I have my own system," he said, "and it's the
game that's important. Besides, I already know how to catch the
ball." What seemed to upset some Japanese was that Smith succeeded
too easily. In one game, he even hit a home run and a double without
taking any batting practice at all – something that happens
occasionally in the United States but never in Japan where hard
pregame workouts for everyone are the norm. "People who behave like
Smith," complained one longtime Giants fan, "make a mockery of
the whole system."

The
1984 season was particularly frustrating in regard to recalcitrant
Americans. Three of them quit in midseason. One was Jim Tracy, who
walked out on the Taiyo Whales in protest over being precipitously
removed from a game. Another was Don Money, the onetime Milwaukee
star who left because, among other things, he didn't like his
apartment or the aging facilities used by his team, the Kintetsu
Buffaloes. "It looks like a bomb hit it," said Money of the
clubhouse.

The
differences between the Japanese and Americans are so great that the
official team interpreter often winds up playing the role of
peacemaker. The tale is told of the time Tony Solaita, an
American-Samoan who played for the Nippon Ham Fighters, used his
interpreter to warn an opposing pitcher about throwing consecutive
beanballs. "Tell him that if he ever does that again," he said in
his most solemn tones, "I'll *&$#@! kill him." The
interpreter's diplomatic translation – "He asks that you please
don't throw at his head anymore because it makes his wife and
children worry" – prompted a sympathetic apology from the pitcher
and averted future trouble between the two.

At
times, however, interpreters' lack of skill in English has caused
additional problems. When one American told a television interviewer
that he was no longer mad at an opposing player with whom he had had
an altercation, an interpreter solemnly explained to the viewing
audience that the gaijin was no longer insane. Another
interpreter confessed to the two Americans on his team that he didn't
always understand what they were saying and sometimes made up answers
to please the coaches.

Not
every American becomes embroiled in controversy. A soft-spoken
Oklahoman named Randy Bass came as close to being a national hero as
any gaijin ballplayer ever has. Bass, who has spent more than
four years in Japan, won the Central League triple crown in 1985,
leading the Tigers to the pennant. A Hanshin Tigers cheer-group chant
went, "God...Buddha...and Bass."

Bass
tries hard to do things the Japanese way, yet even he has his
detractors. Critics recalled, in particular, his temporarily leaving
the team in midseason 1984 (albeit with permission), to be at his
father's deathbed. His conduct was compared unfavorably with Oh's
who, in true Japanese fashion, missed not a single inning when his
father died last September.

Americans,
for their part, say that nothing they can do will ever make them
fully accepted. They complain of an insular mentality on the part of
the Japanese and of barriers erected to keep them out. For example,
restrictions on foreigners have kept many qualified players out of
annual midseason all-star competition, including one who was leading
the Pacific League in batting last year at the halfway point. Randy
Bass went into the last game of the 1985 season, against the Giants,
with 54 home runs, one shy of Oh's record, and was fed a steady diet
of unhittable pitches, well outside the strike zone. Oh sat back in
his manager's seat and watched it all happen.

Said
the editor of Number, Japan's leading sports magazine, "The
results might have been different if Bass were a Japanese."

"You
go 0-5, and it's Yankee go home"

Warren
Cromartie, the Giants' American outfielder, expressed the feelings of
many Americans when he said. "You're an outcast, period. You go
0-5, and it's Yankee go home. You go 5-5 and nobody pays attention to
you. Bass was an exception, but if he had broken the home-run record,
the Japanese would hate him."

The
question of the gaijin player in Japanese baseball has been
much debated over the years. An Asahi Shimbun survey taken at
the end of 1985 asked the question, "Are foreigners necessary?"
Of those polled, 56 percent of the fans said yes. But only ten
percent of the players – and none of the managers – agreed.

The
Japanese pro-baseball executive committee recently voted –
unanimously – to eventually phase out the gaijin, arguing
that they are overpaid, underproductive and generally irritating.
Said one official, "It's not right that a player no longer wanted
in the United States is the key member of a Japanese team. Besides,
it's ideal that Japanese baseball be played by Japanese alone." Oh,
despite the fact that he is half Chinese, lent his support, saying,
"A real world series between Japan and the United States would be
impossible with foreign players on our teams."

The
Japanese hope that the dynamics which made them an economic power
will make them a baseball champion as well. On a postseason goodwill
tour of Japan in 1984, the Baltimore Orioles fumbled their way to a
record of 8-5-1 against a variety of professional teams. Their
less-than-awe-inspiring performance prompted one Japanese manager to
remark, "It might be just a vacation for them, but they still have
nothing to offer us. They're just bigger, that's all."

Whether
a real world series with the United States ever actually happens or
not, the Japanese passion for baseball is not likely to abate. Nor is
their game likely to lose its "Japaneseness" to any appreciable
degree.

There
are, to be sure, young players who scoff at terms like "fighting
spirit," in the fashion of many young Japanese company employees
nowadays who have no compunction about leaving the office at 5
o'clock or even changing jobs. Lotte Orions star Hiromitsu Ochiai,
32, who has won two triple crowns in his career, and whose annual
salary of $600,000 is tops among Japanese ballplayers, is their hero.
In a preseason interview this year, he said, "It's better not to
practice at all than to practice too much," followed by the equally
blasphemous "I'd play for any club as long as they paid me enough."

But
tradition dies hard. Hanshin Tigers relief ace Kazuyuki Yamamoto
declared last year, at age 35, that he would try his hand at U.S.
major-league baseball – a long-held dream. As soon as he announced
this intention, however, pressure to make him stay was applied from
several quarters, including petitions from fans, newspaper editorials
and a public plea from his mother. "Don't go, my son!" ran an
emotional headline in one major sports daily; "Think of what you
owe the team."